I haven't played Gone Home or Sunless Sea but I will say that Stanley Parable isn't a game, more of an interactive and extremely boring loving movie - I made it about 20 minutes in before blocking the friend who recommended it and cursing the time wasted pirating the piece of poo poo.

lol

i liked the game, and my favorite part were the achievements and museum ending, something about the surreal commentary that taking the game apart and re-arranging it in a new way could be so pointless and yet so effort intensive

Real chat: I was dating a girl for a few months, and she introduced me to Pottermore. I took the test and got a result of Slytherin. Also, I shaved off my mutton chops for work. She broke up with me the next week.

Don't be Slytherin or shave your mutton chops, guys!

when i took the pottermore test it let me choose between gryffindor and ravenclaw. i obviously chose ravenclaw because i'm a nerd.

a result i've been working on for months on end is 75% confirmed real, next week i find out if that last 25% is going to bite me in the rear end or not

but, on the good chance that it's 'if not', then i've just created a huge loving shortcut in my field and i'm going to ride its gravy train for 2-3 publications within the next 12 months while other labs set up and optimize the same thing to start playing catch up

that's my friday night news. i just finished work. rip my social life.

there is actually an app called the Unfriend Finder that does exactly that and it was the absolute worst thing I ever downloaded.

well my idea is different. it's not based on facebook. it's just a website you go to to see who has listed you as their enemy and you build a network of enemies. if you're lucky, you'll have a smaller network on anti-facebook than on facebook.

I don't actually have a top 5 ever because movies can't be read objectively even by the same person twice. It largely depends on moods/what's important to you in life.

For example jaws was a loving masterpiece but I wouldn't put it anywhere near my top 100.

Short term 12, one two three, Harold and maude, the lady from Shanghai, do the right thing would all probably be the 5 movies that I consider my absolute favorites right now and ironically jaws is probably a better movie than all 5 of those put together.

Like I applied to be a part of Mars One even though I lacked any necessary skills to be a part of a team. I actually make a concerted effort to not think about space travel because a lot of the time it will just make me feel horribly depressed that I probably won't ever get to go to space.

If I tell this to people, most of them get all condescending like "oh you never know, space tourism is gonna be a thing, you might be able to go when you're like sixty" or something to that effect and they just don't get it, I don't wanna just leave the atmosphere and check out some stars for twenty minutes and come back, I straight up want to go live on a space station for a while or work on a planetary exploration team or something like that.

When I saw Gravity for the first time I saw it in the theatre twice in one day. I cried like a baby both times. I left that movie maybe with the sort of experience Ecco had with Fury Road, that I'd been waiting my entire life to see a movie like this. The visuals are just so captivating, I know the science is off and the story is weak and I totally don't care. I just love the gorgeous expanse of it, it's even cool on a small screen. I've seen it like eight or ten times now and that shot where the Chinese space station debris is burning up during her re-entry still raises the hairs on the back of my neck.

I just can't think of another movie that has such a strongly positive visceral effect on me. It's not the best sci-fi movie ever and I'm fully aware that it's fatally flawed but I don't care because that movie just gets me.

oh please don't be depressed about not going to space!! as someone (me) who wants to do scientific experimentation for space travel in the next ~10 years, keep in mind all the horrific things we'll have to endure. inter-generational expeditions, people never knowing anything but the inside of a space-ship, new diseases, learning the true depths of our inability to get anything right. all for the chance to escape. i always think of it like living in the 1400s and crossing the atlantic. not pleasant for anyone. and at the end of the day here we are and we ... speak, think and laugh in much the same way we always have and we haven't gained much, much from it.

gravity is a great movie and it's spurned a lot of movie technical improvements to get its sound right, and it motivated studios to invest in other space movies like interstellar which in turn gave us the chance to explore some really cool mathematical models for gravitational lensing! but i think it's worth it keeping in mind how conceited the movie was, and that you're in love with space and not the movie. and to those ends, i highly doubt that you'd be out of place with any skill-sets you might have to volunteer at an observatory, or do amateur backyard telescope star-gazing to help find stray comets that we simply don't have the human-power necessary to map all of them that are coming towards us, or to participate in the numerous health/clinical studies for space food and medication, or to host space education night classes at your local community college to increase public interest etc.

also later this year no man's sky the video game is coming out and i fully plan to pretend i'm a space biologist and blog about discovering new species for a few weeks non-stop. :P
you should try that, i guess you'll find it'll be cathartic much in the same way i will

No, it's a real opinion people have, not things 14 year olds say to be edgy.

i didn't say that the opinion isn't real, more like the opinion is particularly charged

the 'album format is dead' argument really holds up by what you consider 'success' is. if you define success as 'what's constantly shared on social media' or 'which resonates with artist popularity more the single or the album' then gently caress yeah it's dead. if you define it by literally any other metric it's still alive. super artists still hit sales records for albums, streaming services still see full albums played through at an unchanging constant rate, and vinyl is having a resurgence: one of the mediums that is least single-friendly. and even among the super popular artists who are contractually driven to re-affirm this bad culture of singles on the radio, few get their style through at an album length; for example florence and the machine and lady gaga and eminem and and and.

also, i find it socially/economically careless when people regurgitate this argument, because it's a top-down approach to music, where the upper crust of society, those who could afford to buy into apple's ecosystem early on, dictated what's popular; as opposed to a bottom-up approach where people dissect albums at their own leisure and then vote to get what they're interested in on a radio station's playlist

last year someone i work with came out with a mathematical model to auto-generate drugs and they generated 10,000 ones

the pharma companies my coworker reached out to had already tested 7000 (!!) of them.

if you understand how complicated that is, you'd know why it's absolutely wonderful that the pharma industry exists.

it's just awful that fitting into capitalism forces the industry to lobby stupidly and ask for unnecessary rights: the system is broken and forces the motivation to be broken. the people in it are useful and nice i swear.

I pretty much agree with that entirely, and I do think that the mental health side of the industry sees the most egregious examples of shady behaviors (direct to consumer marketing is absurd)

unfortunately the medical side of any field tangentially related to mental health is rotten from the bottom up. we need to start with the change on a social level to stop stigmatizing and complicating mental health understanding. obama's brain initiative is a step. we'll improve.

i saw a set of his today and he was incredibly transphobic and sexist. he kept making jokes about how people who are criticizing him are entitled. he was funny away from those jokes but quite a few people heckled him today. one even said 'It's SHE' when he was making fun of Caitlyn Jenner and another immediately followed up with 'it's SHE and this is ottawa' (i.e. we're quite socially progressive) and i half agreed with them and i don't know what to think.